The Importance Of Testing

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In education, assessment is considered as an essential part of the teaching and learning cycle. Testing is one type of assessment and plays an important in a successful curriculum and learning process. In fact, they can show strengths and weaknesses needed to improve. In addition, they are a powerful tool to assist in evaluating teaching effectiveness. In order to investigate the extent to which the test is useful, a language test must be developed in consideration of three elements consisting of a specific purpose, a particular group of test takers and a specific language use domain. According to Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) theory, there are six test qualities of useful tests including reliability, construct validity, authenticity, interactiveness,…show more content…
A key element in the test usefulness framework is the concept of target language use (TLU) domain. Bachman and Palmer (1996, p. 23) defined it as “the degree of correspondence of the characteristics of a given language test task to the features of a TLU task”. A TLU task is an activity that an individual is motivated by using the target language to achieve a particular objective in a particular situation. Authenticity is considered as an important test quality because of two following reasons. Firstly, it provides a link between performance on the test, TLU task and domain in order to helps to generalize the score interpretations. Secondly, it is test takers’ perceptions of the test that affects on their performance. In order to design an authentic test, the language used is natural as much as possible. Topics and real world situations are interesting and practical. Test construct must facilitate particular tasks which test takers may fave in the TLU domain. For example, in the listening test, conversations should be selected from real world sources such as a podcast, news on TV, a conversation between customers and shop assistant that test takers are likely to have encountered or will encounter in their…show more content…
It basically applies to the ways in which the test will be implemented. Therefore, it does not require more resources that are available like printer, photocopier, paper or classrooms. Indeed, a practical test always stays within time and money constraints, so it is closely related to administration. For example, a colorful test is more effective because it can enhance more interaction. However, it costs too much money and school budget is limited and cannot afford to have this test. As a result, a black and white test is applied to make it more

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